Increasingly, high school students express interest in careers that have purpose and “make a difference”. Furthermore, students from minority racial and linguistic backgrounds may be more interested in careers that offer meaning beyond income or job security. Given these diverse career values, STEM education activities that leverage the motivations and personal values of students to promote learning have the potential to significantly impact student interest and knowledge of engineering careers. To broaden participation in engineering, therefore, a collaborative team-comprised of engineering faculty, education faculty, and high school science teachers-developed a curriculum for formal and informal high school education that aligned with the diverse motivations and life goals of Generation Z students in our predominantly rural region.

This work in progress paper discusses a Virtual Reality system dubbed Virtual Reality Construction Site Safety Simulator (VR-C3S). Within VR-C3S, students can assess the safety of a virtually simulated construction site by utilizing measurement tools available in the simulation. VR-C3S provides a hands-on learning experience to Construction Management students and involves them in active learning. VR-C3S was deployed in Oculus Go and Windows environment. A user evaluation study was conducted to determine how the application performs when compared to traditional learning methods.

The demand for computing professionals in the U.S. workforce is expected to increase over the next several years, while the number of students intending to major in computing has declined. In this BOF session, we focus on the use of service learning to address the growing concern of creating a sustainable pipeline for computing professionals, with an emphasis on broadening participation in computing. We center the discussion around our experiences with the STARS Computing Corps, which engages college students in service-learning to address the national computing talent shortage. The model has been shown to be effective in retaining college students in computing, and STARS alumni credit participation in STARS with helping to develop professional skills. This session will include interactive small group discussions on goals, obstacles, and strategies for applying service learning to broaden participation in computing, grow the K-12 pipeline, and prepare college students with skills demanded in the 21st century workforce.

Evolutionary computation (EC) has been successfully applied to a wide range of design problems. There has also been an abundant amount of work in applying interactive ECs in the design of displays, robot behavior, bitmaps, etc. In the EC literature, one can also see a number of successful design applications of distributed ECs. However, to date, there has been no research in the area of interactive distributed ECs. In this paper, we present an interactive distributed evolutionary algorithm (IDEA) for the design of simple emoticons. We will discuss two ways that our IDEA is currently being used including the areas of EC education and Human Factors.

Five public school teachers were observed during two self-study sessions where they learned to use Visual AgenTalk (VAT). The first session emphasized the basic visual programming skills, while the second introduced ways to reuse existing simulations. Two versions of the reuse tutorial were developed, one offering a concrete example world for reuse, and the second an abstract world. During their learning and reuse sessions, the teachers thought out loud as they worked, enabling a detailed analysis of their goals, reactions, problems, and successes. After each session, the teachers also completed user reaction questionnaires. Although all teachers succeeded in learning the basics of VAT, they varied considerably in their reuse of the example simulations. It appears that the simplified components of the abstract world supported reuse to a greater degree than those of the concrete example world.